Arabian Nights and Days

Arabian Nights and Days is a collection of short fables by author Naguib Mahfouz, based on the classic tome A Thousand and One Nights. Mahfouz relies on many of the stories and characters from the original work to inspire his retellings, including characters like Aladdin, Scheherazade, Sinbad and Ali Baba. The overarching themes of the book are the critique of absolute power, greed and corruption, and the power of love, as well as social critique and political revolution.

Though each of these story-fables has its own unique plot, many of the plots build on each other, creating a larger overarching message about the pains of transformation, social and political turmoil, and the corrupting force of power and wealth. Though based on the ancient fairytales and in many ways set in a historic past, the stories in Mahfouz's Arabian Nights and Days experience contemporary consequences. In one story, “"Nur Al-Din and Dunyazad," for instance, the sister of storyteller Shahrzad dreams of a man who sells perfume, and wakes up to discover that she has become pregnant with his child. Her pregnancy, though brought on by fanciful imagining, has all too real consequences and accompanying pains.

Questions of money and power come to the forefront in "Sanaan al-Gamali," the story of a merchant who is forced to buy his life back from a genie whom he has scorned. The genie demands the merchant kill the local corrupt governor, but when the merchant arrives, the governor proves himself to be even more nefarious than anyone presupposed – he asks to marry the merchant's daughter, gives the merchant's son his own daughter to marry, and before long has written up a convoluted contract that involves the contribution of one of the merchant's relatives.



Other questions of morals appear in “The Cap of Invisibility,” the story of a morally upright man who is given a gift of extraordinary magical value, on the condition that from that day forward, he only do the opposite of what his conscience desires. Though in this story the gift is supernatural, Mahfouz is clearly interested in the ways that incredible power can corrupt even the most righteous of men.

Classic storybook characters appear in “Sinbad,” as the narrator tells the story of his seven voyages, determining from them some dramatic lessons on the proper way to live. These lessons include the idea that living conservatively, based on “worn-out traditions” is “foolish.” In “Aladdin with the Moles on his Cheeks,” the character Aladdin, as a barber of humble origins, meets with a sheikh to talk about the proper ways to worship.

In Arabian Nights and Days, no character is entirely what they seem – people are always changing bodies and realms, as in the story of a girl brought back from the land of the dead and a man who is sent to an otherworldly realm of pure love and happiness, only to discover that he can't stay there forever. Genies are ruthless and vicious, expressing their cruelty towards humans by luring them with magic and their knowledge of human desire toward dangerous and violent endeavors. Governors and police chiefs are often sacrificed in these pages, conjuring up images of the contemporary instability of Egypt into which Mahfouz writes.



Ultimately these seventeen fairy tales give a contemporary spin to classic characters and tellings, creating new moral codes that question the role of tradition and power, while maintaining the reality of many fairytales of old: that the world is dangerous, tempting, and cruel.

Naguib Mahfouz was an Egyptian author and the winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in literature. His writing career lasted more than seventy year, during which time he wrote 34 novels, hundreds of short stories and plays, and much more. His last novel before his death was The Seventh Heaven; since his passing in 2006, four new translations of his work have come out posthumously. Mahfouz was a controversial author, writing often on existentialist and politically revolutionary themes. At least one assassination attempt was made on his life, which failed – he eventually died peacefully at age 94.